Everyone with an ingrained prejudice in the Southern California transit fight has her or his unsurprising pet, pat reason for why ridership is down on Metro and other systems’ buses and trains the last couple of years.

See, say those in the pro-sprawl, pro-car corner. This just goes to show that the place where America perfected automotive culture in the 1950s and ‘60s is still naturally unfit for the guvmint-backed pipe dream of rapid transit. Just build more freeways and it’ll be back to Go, granny, go. Check that. Not freeways. Toll roads. Then it’s a pay-as-you-go situation. If you can afford to pay, you go. If not, you crawl with a few hundred thousand other vehicles at all hours of every day. Best of luck with that.

And then there are those on the pro-transit side who say ridership is down because we haven’t invested enough and all we have to do is invest more — plus bike lanes. And that transit wants to be free — so eliminate fares.

There’s a third angle that is a new one to me but that is certainly not without merit. This analysis, by the Bus Riders Union, says that housing prices are driving poor people out of every formerly affordable neighborhood, so the people who used to be bus and train customers have flown the coop altogether.

Everyone’s a little bit wrong here. And the argument is a bit of an academic one, filled with classic posturing. In Los Angeles County especially, what with the creation of the massive cash cow that is the Measure M 1 percent forever sales tax to fund Metro, rail and bus line building isn’t going away. It’s going to entirely change the transportation infrastructure of the populous core of our region over the next 30 years. If the sprawlers are right and no one really wants to get out of their cars — and these same folks are the ones who say Southern Californians don’t want to live in multi-family buildings near transit-friendly development, so that what we really need is more exurban sprawl, with three-bedroom housing tracts filling in the wild gap from here to Joshua Tree — well, there’ll be some swell views of empty light-rail cars on lines from Sherman Oaks to Santa Monica from those new toll roads.

I am not a transit, or anti-transit, lobbyist — just a native Southern Californian interested in getting around. One of the main reasons people here have been driving more, riding buses less is that more of us are employed than in the years after the recession. And more of us are jumping into Ubers and Lyfts. While we find the rail system of great interest for two reasons — not being stuck in the perma-gridlock on our freeways, and not having to find a place to park once we get somewhere — the last-mile problem is a deterrent. If we’re going to the Geffen Contemporary, it’s just a block from the Gold Line. If we’re going to our buddy’s house in Sierra Madre Canyon, it’s a hike we’re not willing to take.

Jitneys, bike-shares, electric scooters — those will come along to fill in the gaps. We will never be dense Manhattan, where the subway (though city dwellers love to bemoan its current maintenance woes) gets you where you are going in a New York minute. We will have a better system than the Bay Area’s BART, which got a big jump on us half a century ago but is an expensive-to-ride, poorly maintained system now. It will take some time to become convenient enough for most of us who can afford a car to give it up more often. But what a welcome alternative it will be. On a recent Saturday evening, it was bumper-to-bumper on the 210 all the way east from Pasadena to Claremont. It was like weekday rush hour was 20 years ago. Transit ridership will come back, once the system connects more dots.

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.